This picture shows a diversity of people of different color, race, ethnicity, gender and age
Role Cultural Competency in Applied and Critical Medical Anthropology
"Cultural Competence is a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or among professionals that enables effective work in cross-cultural situations" (Society for Medical Anthropology – Medical Anthropology? n.d.) Cultural Competence is also defined as "acquire and use knowledge of health beliefs, attitudes, practices and communication patterns of clients and their families to improve services, strengthen programs, increase community participation and close gaps in health status among diverse population groups" (Joralemon, 2010) To understand Cultural Competence, one need to recognize Cultural Incompetence.Anne Fadinam's account of the awful circumstances surrounding the care of a Hmong Child, Lia Lee in "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" is one of the innumerable cases of cultural incompetence. In Fadinam's account, failure to communicate across cultural divides is the problem. Who is responsible for Cultural Competence? The video below shows the difference between Incompetent and competent cultural care.
Applied medical anthropologists struggle to remind health workers that culture is not conterminous with ethnicity work as this encourages medical staff to develop a cookie-cutter approach to cultural competency, using over simplified and stereotypical synopses of beliefs and practices of each ethnic group (Joralemon, 2010) Medical Anthropologists work on cultural competency in a variety of U.S. health care contexts. An example is anthropolosgists working on a measure of "functional biomedical acculturation" to assess how much of the culture of biomedicine is familiar to families (Joralemon, 2010) "A research conducted by a group of medical anthropologists from the University of Memphis who used standard anthropological interviewing techniques to explore the challenges and frustrations of those who are employed as medical interpreters for Latino patients showed that, there is a conflict between medical staff who treats interpreters as just a translation derive and the interpreters' own view of their role as cultural brokers who try to mediate between the sometimes- hostile staff and overwhelmed migrant workers" (Joralemon, 2010)
Example of Strategies for Working With Patients In Cross-Cultural Settings to Improve Cultural Competency
- Learn about the cultural traditions of the patients you care for.
- Pay close attention to body language, lack of response, or expressions of anxiety that may signal that the patient or family is in conflict but perhaps hesitant to tell you.
- Ask the patient and family open-ended questions to gain more information about their assumptions and expectations.
- Remain nonjudgmental when given information that reflects values that differ from yours.
- Follow the advice given by patients about appropriate ways to facilitate communication within families and between families and other health care providers.
- http://www.euromedinfo.eu/how-culture-influences-health-beliefs.html/